Adding an archive ID to many images using digikam

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Apologies if there is a thread but I searched and couldn’t find what I am looking for.

Essentially, I am scanning a ton of old family photos in an attempt to digitize them. I will be keeping the photos themselves but they will be put in certain archives (ie. Scan_1990_001 or similar.) What I am looking to do is to add metadata (via XMP, the ITC one, etc.- doesn’t matter) so that the entire album I scanned is correctly labeled so if you wanted the original, you could go to the batch it is in and be done.

Now I know I could do folders but I am looking to put these on a pigallery2 site and I would rather not segment it out by folder there (ie. if I have 10 batches that are all 1990 I would prefer to keep all the photos in one big 1990 folder for easy perusal and not in 10 separate subfolders under 1990.)

Now- what I found so far is there is a “Job ID” which is close to what I want but it appears that the digikam software (I am using the latest flatpak) only lets you do these 1 by 1 (Item-Metadata Editor) even if you select all; you would use the “Next” button to go to the next. This would be extremely tedious to do for thousands upon thousands of photos.

So basically I am wondering if someone knows a good way to do this where it won’t be too prominent (ie. caption field.) If it does turn out to be impossible to do easily then I think I would use the caption field with something like “Archive Scan_1990_001” since I believe that can all be done in batches.

Edit- I am on linux too so if there is some easy way to just do this myself with exiftool then I could easily do that too. I only just now thought of this so I will research it. Anyone have any ideas of a proper field to set this to?

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Select all Pictures you want to set this ID, choose on the right side “Captions” and then you can set the ID for all selected pictures at once in one field under “Description”. Don’t forget to apply this at the bottom right.

If you want to keep this ID writen direct in the metadata of the imagefile (not to sidecars) you have to choose this in the programsettings.

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Thanks. I did decide that it was probably the best field to put it in anyway.

I do have it all set up to write to image metadata itself as I want this to be portable to other people (who won’t use nor have my digikam DBs.)

Thanks again.